Max Baucus: God’s 2nd-Greatest Gift to Harry Reid

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The Lord has been kind to Senate majority leader Harry Reid lately. First, John Ensign, his fellow senator from Nevada and a Republican, got caught having an affair with a staffer. Then it was revealed that Ensign’s parents gave the staffer’s family nearly $100,000 as part of a “pattern of generosity.” That distracted the Nevada media from Reid, who has a tough reelection battle coming up in 2010. Lately, another of Reid’s colleagues has been helping him out: Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee. With Baucus enraging the left by reaching out to Republicans to put together a deal (or not) on health care reform, liberals have less energy for a once-popular pasttime: slamming Reid. The left used to obsess about getting Reid out of his leadership post. Now all the talk is about dumping Baucus from his chairmanship.

Meanwhile, the White House has been lending Reid a hand by making moves that could delay or cancel the proposed nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain, which is extremely unpopular with Nevadans. Reid has also stayed out of Nate Silver’s list of the 10 Senate seats most likely to change hands in the 2010 elections, as prominent Republicans have decided not to run against him. And then there’s the not-so-small matter of Reid’s war chest. He raised $3.25 million between April and June, has $7.33 million in cash on hand, and aims to have raised $25 million by next November. With the media distracted by Ensign, the White House boosting his cause, Republicans shying away from the race, the blame for the health care mess falling on Baucus, and the coffers filling up, it’s been a good month for the majority leader.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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